5/25/2011

Eric Cantor Leads the GOP in Dancing Off the Cliff:If things go the way they're starting to look, political history books in the future will say something like, "In 2008, the American people, sick of the bullshit they'd dealt with for the last 8 years, voted to decisively change the direction of the nation. In 2010, scared to death by Republican threats that President Barack Obama would personally murder their grandparents, voters cravenly ran back to what they perceived was the safety of the very people who had wrecked the country, giving the GOP a big ass victory. In 2012, remembering that 'Oh, shit, these are the fuckers who really do want to kill us,' they voted Democrats back into the majority in the House and reelected the President."

Sure, it's an incomplete history, at best, leaving out, for instance, Obama's own responsibility in not rallying the base for the 2010 election and Republican intransigence in the Senate. But mostly it paints a portrait of an electorate that is so horribly damaged by the endless post-9/11 rape of the nation by the Bush administration that it's desperately flailing about for help, less a turtle on its back than a fat man beating a candy machine that ate his last change.

Should the GOP go pouring off that high cliff onto the rocks of electoral failure, they'll have to thank chief lemming Eric Cantor for leading them there. For as skeevy a politician as House Speaker John Boehner is, as twerpish an asshole as Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell is, no one tops Virginia Republican and House Majority Leader Cantor for sheer creepiness and undiluted lunatic stupidity combined with a powerful position. He's a bespectacled ideologue who looks like every male high school science teacher who ends up boning a cheerleader on a lab table and losing his job.

As often as Cantor is predictably wrong on things like the auto company bailout and the stimulus, he has, to this point, been seen as the future of the GOP, a "young gun" who is gonna Gingrich this motherfuckin' party to the next decade. Inasmuch as one can use a single election to predict What Comes Next, after last night's big-ass loss in a rabidly Republican district in New York, Cantor has become a plague on his own caucus.

For Cantor has been desperately fluffing the Paul Ryan budget and, well, Ryan himself, saying that he'd support a Ryan candidacy for president. Not only that, but Cantor said that all the GOP candidates should announce their support for the Ryan budget. "What Paul Ryan is about is real leadership," Cantor said just a couple of days ago. And as for the actual candidates? "I'm looking for them to embrace our formula in the Ryan budget, I'm looking for them to embrace a leadership role that takes the tough positions," he said. So apparently the GOP's degraded definition of "leadership" is "killing Medicare so that taxes can be cut on the wealthy."

Which, of course, is why Democrat Kathy Hochul won in the same district that went for the madman Carl Paladino for governor of New York. Sure, Cantor said it wasn't about the Ryan budget and Medicare, but when the ultra-conservative Washington Timesreports that "The loss could serve as a gut check for the GOP’s support of House Budget Committee Chairman Paul D. Ryan’s plan to slice trillions from federal spending in the coming years in part by transforming Medicare into a subsidy-driven program," it was about Medicare.

And, then, just to make sure that he's become a total jerk, Cantor told the Times that Joplin, Missouri, can suck his balls on emergency funding post-tornado bomb: "If there is support for a supplemental, it would be accompanied by support for having pay-fors to that supplemental." (Missouri Republican Roy Blunt of, you know, Joplin, responded by taking the "if" out of the equation.)

Cantor has gone all in on the Ryan budget and its destruction of Medicare, having forced the House members to all vote for it. This should be the clearest path to Democratic victory possible, especially considering how much irrational Medicare fears drove the 2010 election. Post-win last night, some Democrats are ready to use that to go on the attack, some are being predictably milquetoast about it, and some are, just as predictably, fucking it up.